First, there is the thing about the neighbors. I have mentioned the neighbors before. There are a lot of them.

Dog-Poop-Catapult Recipients left. Oh, that was a major event! Boxes upon boxes of undefinable objects sitting out at the curb for weeks, trips back and forth to their 600 cars. At first I thought only some of them were moving but no, Big Daddy took his SUV and left also. With all three dogs: Big, Medium, and Yappy.

And then there was quiet.

For a day.

Then the pickup trucks arrived, and the New People came.

I was going to give New People a big bag of apples, and then I got to thinking that maybe they don’t eat apples and anyway isn’t apples a weird thing to bring a new neighbor? So I skipped the gift thing.

He is a karate instructor. She is bigger/taller/more muscular than he is (and he looks pretty buff).

Which explains the sounds I hear at night, like someone is using the wall between our places as a kickboxing dummy. Not that there aren’t a lot of various loud sounds coming from my place from time to time, but every night. Like at 10 pm. THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP.

He also spends a fair bit of his time on the phone. On the porch. Which is under my bedroom window. While he smokes. Until 1 am.

However, everything balances out:

Day before yesterday, another moving truck appeared behind the house across from me, the house that’s next door but with a strip of grass between. If you’ve been keeping up, this is the house of Judgy Bus Stop Mom. All day as I was in and out I noticed the three-year-old standing on the truck ramp but never saw anyone actually putting anything in the truck. Were they moving or simply storing a moving truck in their driveway?

J.B.S. Mom said hello to me, first time in months! She didn’t mention the large moving truck not six feet from her, so clearly she hadn’t noticed it yet. I didn’t want to give anything away, so I didn’t either.

At the end of the day they were finished levitating their invisible goods into the truck, and it was now out front with a trailer attached and they were attempting to drive a car onto the trailer. I dragged my free stuff that even Craigslist doesn’t want to the curb. J.B.S. Mom was out there watching Husband try to drive the car onto the trailer. “Once you don’t want something, no one else does either,” she remarked to no one in particular. Still nothing about moving. Perhaps no one had told her? I was prepared for a big emotional scene with her crying and sobbing about how much she’d miss me, but I think the strain was getting to her so I let her off with a have-a-nice-life nod and a semi-smile at her semi-joke.

This week Serena had her Worst Day Ever At School (something about a lost mitten; no pie for her!) followed by One Her Best Days So Far At School (something about a friend and plans to play together the next day). Life should be like that. Passionate and intense.

Eric amused himself in the Indian grocery yesterday by turning in circles in one spot until he fell down on the floor last cleaned in 1982.

I now despise Freecycle as much as Craigslist; could you explain why you are upset at me because I wasn’t home when you came to get my crappy FREE dresser, when you never told me when you were coming? And also? Woman who came to get my daughter’s very nice outgrown clothes? Is there a reason you didn’t tell me your six-year-old was INCREDIBLY FAT AND THEREFORE CAN’T FIT IN THOSE CLOTHES so you’re going to sell them on eBay? I know you are so couldn’t you have just been honest about it? And then I would have given the clothes to the 4000 really nice people who emailed me repeatedly and actually wanted clothes their kids could wear instead of making up that bogus story about your house burning down. I wish I had had the balls to just not let you have the clothes.

And today it is sunny and it is warm and I will go outside. The end.

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3 Responses to “and everything still dances to the background of bulldozers and chainsaws”

OMG, I love the neighbor stories. More please. I have some fabulous (NOT) neighbors here on Baby Island and I have some 6 Sentences coming out about them on the 21st. It makes me happy to write about them. Endless inspiration.